Mobile devices with integrated media capturing components have become ubiquitous. One common example is a digital camera integrated in a cellular telephone. Another example is a handheld personal digital assistant with an integrated voice recorder. Many people today take advantage of these devices with greater adoption every day.
One problem with these devices is that it can be difficult or cumbersome to extract the content once it has been captured. For example, many users have difficulty accessing images captured using a digital camera integrated into a cellular phone. A common technique used to access those images may be to send a multimedia message (including, but not limited to photos, videos, audio or other enhanced multimedia content) from the user's cellular phone to the user's e-mail account. This technique enables a user to merely extract the images stored on the mobile device, but it does not provide the user with any meaningful mechanism to use or share the images.
Another technique that has evolved recently is the ability for a user to transmit an image to a content destination maintained by the user's cellular service provider (the “carrier”). One example of this technique is embodied in the “Pix Place” service offered by Verizon Wireless, Inc. With this technique, the carrier essentially offers its subscribers the ability to send and receive multimedia messages between cellular phones. However, the service is available only to the carrier's subscribers. Subscribers of other carriers cannot avail themselves of the service. The Pix Place service allows subscribers of a limited number of other carriers certain fundamental usage of the service, such as merely transmitting or receiving multimedia messages to or from the service subscribers.
The inventor has identified a lack in the industry of a cross-carrier multimedia destination. Such a destination, if it existed, could enable previously-unknown services, such as enhanced techniques for sharing multimedia content and monetizing that content.